The Addams Family on Nintendo Switch Review: Pinball FX AND The Ultra-Rare Pinball Arcade Version

We’re among the very few people that own the Nintendo Switch versions of the Pinball Arcade’s Bally/Williams tables that were listed for a matter of minutes on April 6, 2018 before being delisted. We can’t get confirmation if these even appeared on the New Release list on the Switch’s eShop. We’re pretty sure they didn’t. We’ve also never been able to confirm that anyone bought these. Hey, we didn’t either! Like most digital pinball fans, by the time we found out they’d been listed, they were already long gone. It wasn’t even two hours before they were taken down. So, how’d we get them? After our work on The Pinball Arcade Buyer’s Guide, someone who appreciated our effort sent us copies. From what we hear, more people signed the Declaration of Independence than own these. Weirdly, we don’t have a complete set of TPA tables on Switch. We’re missing Star Trek and AC/DC, both of which are also delisted (and Whoa Nellie & Big Buck Hunter never were released at all). Still, these Bally/Williams pins, released in the normal Pinball Arcade “season” sets, are among the rarest content ever officially released in the history of any Nintendo platform.

These tables are gone, and they are NEVER coming back. There is no way to acquire them. Please do not pester Farsight for them. I’ve independently verified that the review codes no longer exist. We are SO grateful to own these, and yes, we’ve backed them up on memory cards. These will NOT become lost media, I swear it to you. Now, in some cases, we think these might actually be unfinished prototypes which meshes with the whole “we never meant to release these” vibe of TPA on Switch. Cirqus Voltaire and Scared Stiff especially play poorly. BUT, most of the pins play fine, and yes, you can play them in table mode. So, what to do with them? Well, we’re going to pit Pinball FX and The Pinball Arcade head-to-head. Did fans miss out? Apples & Oranges? Only one way to know! We dueled on each table. Now, only the Vices can vote for who won because Elias and Dave can’t play the Pinball Arcade builds, and other versions of these TPA tables aren’t 100% identical to TPA on Switch so Dave’s previous TPA ratings can’t carry over. Since The Pinball Arcade builds are delisted, we’re only comparing to the FX builds, which might highlight where Zen went right, and where they still have room to improve. These are “special features” at the Pinball Chick, but they should also be considered the definitive reviews of each Pinball FX Williams table on Switch.

Thank you Sasha the Kid for your hard work on these. Watch out, people. She has a black belt in Taekwondo now.

THE ADDAMS FAMILY
PINBALL FX FOR NINTENDO SWITCH

Thoughts of a Designer with Dave Sanders: “Learning to ride a bicycle: practice, balance, and more than a little intimidation to begin with. Mishaps and accidents are all but guaranteed. But, once it’s drilled into you, you never really forget. That’s Addams. Actually that defines much of Pat Lawlor’s career. His classics have always taken time to gel with me, and Addams took especially longer than was typical to learn to love (my sense of balance is lousy and Addams has no training wheels). But respect the effort, one eventually does. Zen has captured that pinball journey, that essence of “oh, riiiiiight” absolutely spot-on here with only the FIXABLE electric chair exploit (see below) letting it down. But no, you are still not going to get me to gush later over Lawlor’s ‘masterwork’ which followed up this one, the widebody I certainly admire but can admit to not personally liking that much. That one lies perpetually just beyond the border of the Comfort Zone, and even Rod Serling can only work so many miracles.”

You didn’t really believe us when we said we’d never write another Addams review, did you? As of this writing, Zen still hasn’t fixed the problem with the Electric Chair on Nintendo Switch. It allows players to cheese the doors by taking a dead flip from the chair and allowing the ball to hop from the left flipper to the right, at which point, 19 out of 20 times it’ll roll-up the switch and light the electric chair. It’s an easy conversion shot to take, too. Maybe the only easy shot on the whole table. Now, if you use this trick and don’t move off it, you’re not going to score a ton of points and, eventually, Seance will wreck your rhythm anyway. But, this trick can get you to the wizard in record time (Angela has done it in under two minutes). While this dead flip roll can happen on a real life Addams pin, it’s very rare, which is the only reason why Addams’ average rating fell over half-a-point on Switch. Patch this out and Addams has at least four MASTERPIECE votes coming and a shot at the Pantheon otherwise. Addams on Switch is still a Certified Excellent table that shoots fantastically on Nintendo’s platform, but it needs that last bit of fine tuning. Oh, and when they do it, they need to reset the leaderboards, even if this will cost Oscar his Arcade Mode world record. Which would be especially hilarious because he didn’t use the exploit. Put a smile on our faces, Zen. Well, five out of the six of us.😈
Stand Alone Release ($9.99)
Type: Solid State – Dot-Matrix Display
Based on The Addams Family by Bally (1992)
Designer: Pat Lawlor
Conversion: Zoltan “Pazo” Pataki
Duel Winner: Angela
Cathy: GREAT (4 out of 5)
Sasha the Kid: GREAT
Angela: GREAT
Oscar: GOOD (3 out of 5)
Dave: GREAT
Elias: GOOD
Scoring Average 3.66 – Awarded a CERTIFICATE OF EXCELLENCE
FX Difference: 0.54 Less
TPA Difference: 0.25 Less

THE PINBALL ARCADE ON NINTENDO SWITCH
THE ADDAMS FAMILY COMPARISON

Pinball FX

The Pinball Arcade

The Pinball Arcade version of Addams Family on Switch does indeed include the option for the Gold version (Special Collector’s Edition) of the table and its extra modes. We opted to play the gold version on TPA. Playing on two different engines back-to-back is a trip, and in the case of Addams, I wish everyone could feel the difference. Sometimes it’s like playing pinball on the moon, but Angela insists the actual shooting angles off the flippers are accurate enough that her muscle memory from real tables mostly works. Then she proved it by lighting us up. Her first ball on Addams TPA for Switch was better than any of our best Addams games on Switch, in any mode, even if you subtract the points from the extra modes. “The swamp cross-shot (Thing Flips without the automation) is clockable on TPA, as it is in real life. Sometimes it feels like Zen believes if players get good at making shots, there must be something wrong with their build, so they ‘fix it’ by adding artificial unpredictability to every shot to correct a problem that doesn’t exist. People get good at pinball. That’s how it’s supposed to work. TPA has just as many house balls as Zen, or a real Addams table. That’s Addams Family! But on TPA, if my read of the approaching ball is right and my timing is right, I’m certain the ball will go into the swamp locker. I can’t say that about the Pinball FX version. I can hit the ball approaching at the same speed off the same spot on the flipper, and sometimes it goes in and sometimes doesn’t. That’s just not as fun.”

She’s not wrong. We think it’s more the spin and inertia of the ball, which has never been even slightly life-like since Pinball FX 4 launched, that makes it harder to clock. Zen is great at making tables that look real life, but the ball is not a normal pinball. Wonky as the gravity in TPA is, the ball behaves predictably, and that matters on a rebounding-centric table like Addams. However, let it be said that Zen’s version of the magnets absolutely ANNIHILATES the awful TPA version, which is why FX won Sasha’s vote.
DELISTED
Type: Solid State – Dot-Matrix Display
Based on The Addams Family Special Collector’s Edition by Bally (1994)
Designer: Pat Lawlor
Vice Family High: Angela “ADV” 978,008,970
Cathy: GREAT
Sasha The Kid: GREAT
Angela: MASTERPIECE (5 out of 5)
Oscar: GOOD
Scoring Average: 4.0 – Awarded a CERTIFICATE OF EXCELLENCE

THE VOTES

Cathy: The Pinball Arcade*
Sasha the Kid: Pinball FX
Angela: The Pinball Arcade
Oscar: The Pinball Arcade*
Split Decision: The Pinball Arcade wins 3 – 1
*Oscar and Cathy are both switching votes if the chair exploit is fixed.

Xena: Warrior Princess (Pinball FX Table Review)

Xena: Warrior Princess
First Released May 16, 2024
Main Platform: Pinball FX
Switch Platform: Pinball FX
Designed by Anna Lengyel
Set: Universal TV Classics ($14.99)

**Special Consideration – Half-Broken Physics Options**: Xena has a problem specifically limited to the “normal physics” setting in both the main modes (Classic & Arcade) and all four challenge modes. The left ramp (the third shot from the left, with the wooden bridge) has something horribly wrong with it. It’s one of the most reject-heavy ramps in Pinball FX and there’s no rhyme or reason when it will work, but it absolutely won’t work from a trapped ball shot dead solid perfect at full speed at it. The ball stops before getting to the top of the shot and is flung back down. The most basic, tried-and-true shot you can make in pinball, even if the shot literally can’t be more accurate, still doesn’t work. This is NOT affecting our overall rating of Xena, which we’re awarding our Certificate of Excellence to, but **please note our review applies ONLY to “realistic physics” at this time.** **We consider “normal physics” played in any mode on Xena to be OUT OF ORDER**. This should be an easy to spot and easy to fix patch for Zen Studios. But please be careful not to damage anything while fixing it, Zen, because right now this thing plays so good. Might want to give a longer grace period on the kickbacks, though. And tone them back too. And give Anna a high five, because she earned it with this one.

What a turnaround Xena made. Upon release, it was basically unplayable. Thanks to patchwork, the maddening difficulty was toned way the hell down, and the end result is Xena is now unquestionably one of 2024’s best pins. Let’s get the problematic aspects out of the way first. The kickbacks aren’t well done because of Zen’s continued insistence that they be violent, unpredictable trash fires. Go through all the trouble of lighting both kickbacks only to have the ball go down an outlane, be launched out and go down the OTHER outlane, be kicked back out and straight down the opposite outlane. Instances of both kickbacks being lost from a single triggering is high enough that it feels deliberate. The mini-table is, like so many Zen mini-tables, circular in shape and boring. It’s like they have a cookie-cutter template for these things, because they feel so samey and usually have similar objectives regardless of the theme of the pin.

**Signature Mode – Caesar Roman Assault**: Holy crap! Look at all those cardboard targets! There’s no way this has any sense of grace to it, right? WRONG! The placement is as perfect as a spam-it-all target gets. Ironically, even though you’re shooting enough people to count as a “crowd” there’s absolutely no crowding! There’s also no blocking, so there’s multiple safe angles for each target. Instead, the challenge is from the sheer volume of targets and the fact that the offensive-oriented Xena temporarily becomes a pick ‘n flick-style defensive shooter. There *are* lethal angles to the targets, but in that good, pinball type of way. Really nice. We all really loved this mode.

Finally, and this is a weird one that my friends and family mostly disagreed with: I didn’t find the Chakram that exciting of a shot. I have no clue why that is, either, because by all rights this should be one of the stronger skillshots and gameplay elements in Pinball FX, but it just didn’t “do it” for me. Maybe because there’s a similar shot in Marvel’s Women of Power: A-Force that just does the same thing better. Sometimes these things are inexplicable. But, with all that said, whoa! Xena is chalked-full of fantastic orbits, unique modes, thrilling shots, and some of the best uses of cardboard targets in Pinball FX. The sheer volume of cardboard targets in the above mode is jaw dropping, but the angles they take aren’t designed to ice your ball. In fact, this is one of the few modern Zen tables that doesn’t feel mostly defensive in nature. This is a SHOOTERS pin, and that’s such a breath of fresh air. Even the grind isn’t that bad, and when modes require a little too many shots, at least the payouts aren’t ridiculously back-loaded. In fact, I think Xena’s rule sheet might be its greatest triumph. The scoring is fine-tuned to scientific perfection in a way that would make Lyman Sheats proud. Anna Lengyel’s Homeworld is going to be lambasted by us, but it’s Xena that proves that she’s an elite pinball designer.
Cathy: MASTERPIECE (5 out of 5)
Angela: GREAT (4 out of 5)
Oscar: MASTERPIECE
Jordi: GREAT
Sasha: GREAT
Dash: GOOD (3 out of 5)
Elias: GOOD (Nintendo Switch)
Primary Pinball FX Scoring Average: 4.16 📜CERTIFIED EXCELLENT📜
Nintendo Switch Scoring Average: 4.2 📜CERTIFIED EXCELLENT📜

Pictured: something not as exciting as you would hope. Makes for a fun track toy, though. This is kin to Getaway’s supercharger, but not a SHOT that you have to factor in.

Crypt of the NecroDancer (Pinball FX Table Review)

Crypt of the NecroDancer
Pinball FX Debuting Pin
First Released April 13, 2023
Main Platform: Pinball FX
Switch Platform: Pinball FX
Designed by Gergely ’Gary’ Vadocz
Stand Alone Release ($5.49 MSRP)
Links: Pinball FX Wiki

For all the crap I’m about to give Crypt of the NecroDancer Pinball, it received a Clean Scorecard from my team. A very difficult task, especially considering that all six “Primary” Pinball FX players (IE non-Nintendo Switch) submitted a rating and nobody thought it deserved less than a GOOD rating. My team consists of three millennials/Gen-Xers, a 75 year old retiree, and two children. All of us gave it a positive rating. This is a quality pin. Now, whether or not it reached its fullest potential is another matter.

Based on the indie stalwart that I’ve never really played, because my ability to keep a beat is right up there with my ability to do a Vince Carter 360 windmill jam. Thankfully, you don’t HAVE to be able to keep a beat in this pinball take on it, even though the game talks about it. Really, you just have to shoot whichever shot is lit and/or then shoot the shots where a C (for COMBO) is lit, which builds the coin multiplier, which increases the value of shots, defeated enemies, and bosses. Instead of thinking of this as a rhythm pinball game, think of it as musical chairs pinball. You just have to beat the modes before the music runs out. Jordi said this shares more DNA with something like Safe Cracker than it does with the indie it’s based off of, and he’s right. Now, we rank Safe Cracker second-to-last behind only Han Solo as the worst overall Pinball FX table, so that might sound like a bad thing. It’s not. The only difference is when the time runs out in Safe Cracker, you don’t automatically lose the game. Here, the ball dies if you haven’t completed the current task before the music stops. There’s no overtime, and that absolutely sucks. And what’s especially lousy is they have a perfectly logical penalty already in place. When you finish the mode, whatever music is left can be spent shooting jackpots or entering the store to spend diamonds. Missing out on that is punishment enough. You don’t have to kill them too. It’s rude!

**Signature Element – Digital Targets**: A few Pinball FX and Pinball M tables use what we’ve dubbed “digital targets.” Moving characters that aren’t cardboard targets, usually in the form of full characters. World War Z, Solo, Chucky’s Killer Pinball, and so forth have them. Crypt has probably the best ones. They’re not spongy, which is a major plus. In fact, this is one of the least grindy tables in Pinball FX. Except for collecting diamonds. That’s grindy, needlessly risky, and boring.

Mind you, there’s no actual numeric timer, which would be a nice concession for hearing-impaired players. That’s why it’s especially funny that I played a lot better when I muted the game (I often play all games muted) and just shot like I would any other table. I even broke five out of six available records on the Nintendo Switch version without hearing a single note. Angela, who wears headphones and listens to music when she plays pinball, was also frustrated by the lack of a visual timer. The layout is simple, with the highlight being digital targets based on enemies from the indie game that you smack. The digital targets are an absolute joy to shoot. They never feel like a chore. The orbits are all satisfying to hit. But, there’s so many needlessly merciless moments. Like the diamonds. I’ve had many instances where I broke the brick that was hiding them and made the collection, only it then dropped the ball straight down the f’n drain. Off a made, incentivized shot. Crypt should have been an all-time classic in the annals of Zen Studios, but it’s merely okay because of wanton cruelty. The slingshots aren’t necessarily lethal, but they do burn off a lot of time. It’s not rare at all for the ball to get stuck in an extended volley between them. It looks like the slingshots are playing hot potato with each-other. Crypt doesn’t exactly feel lifelike, as the ball feels both too heavy while also gliding around like a hockey puck, and sometimes that’s good and sometimes that’s bad.

**Signature Mode – Mini Table**: I love the idea here, but the execution spoils the fun. It’s like a dueling pinball where the gravity reverses at the midway point of the table, and you’re trying to shoot the opponent’s drain. But, the physics are rough as hell. When the ball drains on your side, it’s supposed to be pushed back up into play, presumably by a burst of air. But sometimes the mechanism or physics fail and the ball falls immediately back down into the drain. Maybe it’ll go up and down without curving towards the flippers, but more often it doesn’t even clear the drain before it goes back down, costing you more chances if it’s a bonus room or your health if it’s the third boss. This isn’t something you could have flipped to save. The ball didn’t even make it that high. It’s literally inside the drain when whatever happens causes it to fall again. This happens constantly, and I try not to get angry at this type of thing, but this one got me because it’s just so lazy. Plus, it didn’t need to be this way in the first place. When the ball drains, the ball could have been teleported to the lane and the player loses health or chances, or have a VUK in the corner that spits the ball back out. Those options come with zero risk of mechanical or physics engine failure. No player can ever become frustrated by it and rendered less likely to purchase more Pinball FX tables. But, instead of doing that, nah, just a little puff of air that may or may not work. It’s one of those design choices so obviously bad that you can practically hear the designer saying “eh, maybe it just pops back up. Or not. Who cares? It’s only pinball!”

The center orbit (third from the left) is where the ball exits the shop, and once in a while, it just drops the ball straight down the drain (this effect is multiplied in the Switch version, where it happens so frequently it’s practically expected). Yes, you can nudge to defend it, but this one of those tables where the angles are tailor-made to push the ball towards the lane rails, and also the automatic ball serve might actually just roll so that you can just barely kiss the ball with the very tip of the flipper. I have no clue why they continuously do this type of thing, but on a table with a strict time limit that wants you to shoot to the beat of the music, shouldn’t the challenge have come from making shots? Even on an experimental table, their designers would rather do everything they can possibly do to prevent you from controlling the ball. They want you to make shots to the beat of the music, but they also want to make it as hard as possible to get off a shot. The absolute worst possible thing is someone holding the ball with the flipper. They couldn’t even let that mentality go this one time on a table that’s trying to do something no pinball table has ever done before. At this point, you have to wonder if Zen Studios design staff hobbles around on crutches on account of their constant shooting themselves in the foot. I wanted to give this a BAD rating because of the hostility towards ball control, but I couldn’t. The targets are too fun. The orbits are. The modes are. They’re so much fun that the story isn’t “Crypt of the NecroDancer barely gets a Clean Scorecard.” It’s “Crypt of the NecroDancer should have entered the Pantheon and it didn’t come close.”
Cathy: GOOD (3 out of 5) THE PITS* on Nintendo Switch (1 out of 5)
Angela: GOOD – (BAD on Nintendo Switch, 2 out of 5)
Oscar: GOOD (GOOD on Nintendo Switch)
Jordi: GOOD
Dash: GREAT (4 out of 5)
Sasha: GREAT (GREAT on Nintendo Switch)
Elias: GREAT (Nintendo Switch)
Primary Scoring Average: 3.33 🧹CLEAN SCORECARD🧹
Switch Scoring Average: 2.8 – GOOD
*On Switch this thing dumps balls down the drain like crazy. Orbits that you can confidently shoot in the primary versions of Pinball FX kill you in this version. It needs work.
Some review copies were provided in this review, others were paid for.

World Cup Soccer (Pinball FX Table Review) UPDATED with Nintendo Switch Details

World Cup Soccer
First Released February, 1994
Zen Build Released October 20, 2022
Main Platform: Pinball FX
Switch Platform: Pinball FX
Designed by John Popadiuk
Conversion by Zoltan ’Pazo’ Pataki
Stand Alone Release ($9.99)
Link to Strategy Guide

A lot of tables use sports themes, but few are as good at creating a real tie to athletic competition quite like World Cup.

UPDATE: The Nintendo Switch has been patched and tables are working the way they’re supposed to. Well, except this one. Read below.

World Cup’s inclusion in Pinball FX was a revelation for me. No filing the serial numbers off and calling it “World Champion Soccer” for Zen Studios. They went out and got the World Cup deal signed. It’s a sign that no license is out of bounds. At this point, there’s only one Williams/Bally pin I’d be stunned for Zen to actually get a deal made for, and that’s for 1997’s NBA Fastbreak. I don’t even necessarily think you NEED the license for a table like World Cup. Farsight turned it into a generic soccer theme and it was fine, and Zen already outdid them in the way that matters a lot more: their conversion is just plain better. Pinball Arcade’s take on this classic had an especially brutal left ramp. As a late-stage release, they never got around to fixing it. Zen got it right from the start. A slapshot that enters the ramp cleanly will not result in a rejection, which could happen in Pinball Arcade. When a rejection does happen, it feels intuitive. Like “yep, that one wasn’t good.” That by itself makes a BIG difference and turns a middling digital pin into a very fun one.

“What are we going to do for the ‘enhanced graphics’ on World Cup? What do you mean you don’t have any ideas? Okay, screw it. Do we have any unused graphics from other tables? Whirlwind does? Use it!”

The big news is my father, who is NOT a fan of John Popadiuk, has awarded World Cup Soccer MASTERPIECE status. Most of us don’t agree. Dad’s argument is the following four points. (1) World Cup is focused on ball control that rewards carefully setting up your shots and (2) instead of the entire scoresheet offering strategic flexibility, World Cup offers shot selection flexibility. In other words, modes and goals come out in a specific order, but most of the modes can be done via different shots. Take multiball for example. While making a goal is the jackpot, you can shoot either ramp or the saucer in front of the goal to re-light the jackpot. (3) This is the most balanced-scoring Popadiuk table. (4) Every shot is fun.

The goal is one of the all-time great pinball shots. Adding shots that target the goalie was a stroke of genius.

On point #1, while I agree that “ball control” is the primary gameplay theme of World Cup, I don’t think you necessarily need to slow down the pace to play World Cup well. I think that this is a table where converting rebounds to quick shots matters a great deal. There’s plenty of time-sensitive scoring opportunities where you can’t always just grab a trap and wait for the perfect shot. Oscar had a chance to prove his way was right and he only won 2 out of 14 match-ups against us. The shooting area between the flippers and the goal is tight, which makes it hard to juggle a multiball. I think quick, efficient shots matter, or in my case, just shooting for volume and hoping for the best. He’s probably right on his other three points, depending on how you feel about Cirqus Voltaire’s scoring. While World Cup heavily back-ends points via end of ball bonuses, you do actually have to work for those bonuses. Hell, you have to activate them by scoring goals, which is AWESOME. This might be my favorite way of doing end-of-ball scoring. More importantly, the four bonuses require you to tour the table since one is tied to the ramps, one to the spinner, one to the bumpers, and one to the goalie.

The magna-save is particularly worthless. It doesn’t catch anything, at least in Pinball FX.

World Cup Soccer IS a ton of fun, but it’s not perfect. This is where my lack of familiarity with real life World Cup Soccer pins comes into play, because I’m not entirely sure how powerful the magna-save is in real life. On Pinball FX, it isn’t strong enough to stop any ball you know is going to go straight down the drain. In fact, I don’t think I ever once used it to affect. On the other hand, the outlanes were well handled. I don’t think the right one was particularly lethal, as I was able to use a slight nudge to defend it. My biggest problem is so nit-picky I feel guilty for saying it: it takes too long for World Cup to spit out the third ball during multiball. I’ve had instances where I made a jackpot, relit the jackpot, and was shooting the second jackpot before the third ball came out. Usually, it released at the least opportune time. For a table that leans so heavily into multiball, this sure ain’t a very good multiball table. I didn’t REALLY start to do well until I stole my father’s “use only two balls during the wizard” tactic. Which eventually led to me hitting the buzzer beater to end all buzzer beaters and claiming the distance challenge record on Xbox (and #3 overall). Otherwise, this is a table where the #1 challenge is trying to prevent the frequent multiballs from clearing each-other out.

I just found out the dog’s name is “Striker.”

For me, I think World Cup is the definitive “amazing, but something just doesn’t work for me” pin. I might not be super familiar with real life World Cup pins, but I do remember the ball reacting more violently to the giant spinning ball. In this adaptation, it rarely factors into the gameplay in a meaningful way, except maybe preventing the occasional straight-down-the-middle plunge. Maybe. Angela doesn’t think it spins fast enough. Either way, I think it’s just a big waste of real estate that shrinks the playfield in a way that doesn’t feel true to the sport. Soccer fields are big and wide. This sucker is downright cramped. Because it’s a defensive-oriented pin that puts a high premium on rebounding, World Cup feels more sporty than most pins. It just doesn’t necessarily feel like the right sport. (Sasha made a good point: while a soccer field is wide and vast, the ACTION itself is usually packed into a tiny space and the main defensive strategy of soccer is to give your opponent as little room to maneuver as possible, thus making World Cup Soccer true to the sport. I admit, she has a point!) Oh, I still enjoy it. The goal is an all-timer in the annals of pinball. It’s NEVER not a joy to hit that shot, but World Cup has a few other great shots. Both ramps are satisfying to shoot, and it has one of the better uses of a spinner out there. This is a GREAT table. I just wish it didn’t feel so suffocating with its narrowness.

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UPDATE – Nintendo Switch: Following the big update, we’re now ready to say that World Cup on Nintendo Switch is probably Zen’s worst translation of a real life pin, well, ever. The angles are all wrong. Compare shooting the goal on any of Zen’s other versions of World Cup Soccer to their Nintendo Switch version and you can immediately feel the difference. It’s just all wrong. You actually can’t really aim at the goal. Popping a straight-up shot is not THAT difficult of a shot, but it’s nearly impossible to make it on Switch, and that’s just the start of the problems. The saucer above the left flipper constantly throws the ball straight down the drain. We really hoped these things would be fixed following the update. Honestly, I think the saucer is more lethal now than ever. It shouldn’t be lethal at all. Meanwhile, the flippers feel like they don’t have enough strength. There’s no punch off of them. This is a really horrible effort. Honestly, a rating of BAD is being VERY generous.

Cathy: GREAT (4/5) – BAD on SWITCH (2/5)
Angela: GREAT – BAD on SWITCH
Oscar: MASTERPIECE – BAD on SWITCH
Jordi: GREAT (4/5)
Dash: GREAT (4/5)
Sasha: MASTERPIECE (5/5) – GOOD on SWITCH (3/5)
Dave: GOOD on SWITCH
Scoring Average: 4.14 – GREAT
Nintendo Switch Scoring Average: 2.4 – BAD
📜Awarded a Certificate of Excellence📜
N00b Factor: Even though it has fewer shots than some pins, what shots are here use simple, easy to learn angles. World Cup can be a pretty difficult pin to get used to, but it’s excellent for training rebounding and ball control skills. When you miss the goalie, the ball is going to come back down at an unpredictable angle, and learning to catch a ball and bring it under your control is just about the most valuable skill you can have in pinball. This is also a game that’s VERY generous with extra ball opportunities.
Verdict: An excellent “difficult shooter” starter pin.

VICE VERSUS

You know, for a table themed around sports, World Cup Soccer sure isn’t very good as a versus table. The #1 requirement of such a table is that it’s fun to watch someone else play, and World Cup really isn’t outside of multiball or the wizard. The way the wizard is handled is pretty much tailor-made for excitement and cheers. Only one time did any of us “blowout” Germany during the wizard, and that was when Oscar won 7 to 4. Otherwise, it’s always fun to see someone get hot during a multiball, so having a particularly exciting-to-play multiball doesn’t help World Cup much. You’ll note that, for most games, three of us had similar scores and one player broke out for the win. That’s just not fun to watch. World Cup is a strong table, but it doesn’t make for a good competitive table. My family has been really sick for the last couple weeks, so our World Cup gameplay was spread over multiple days. It didn’t matter. It was me versus Angela, with Dad taking two games (and one world record). Sasha’s lone victory gave her the arcade world record on Switch, her first main-mode world record for a Williams pin.

GAME ONE: CLASSIC MODE
Sasha: 2,398,058,450
Cathy: 4,704,063,120
Angela: 2,389,597,280
Oscar: 2,283,687,410
WINNER: Cathy (1)

GAME TWO: PRO MODE
Cathy: 646,447,130
Angela: 1,095,591,660
Oscar: 609,625,580
Sasha: 621,804,730
WINNER: Angela (1)

GAME THREE: PRO MODE
Angela: 1,869,338,460 (#35 All-Time)
Oscar: 487,949,280
Sasha: 801,889,260
Cathy: 1,674,369,260
WINNER: Angela (2)

GAME FOUR: ARCADE MODE
Oscar: 2,787,785,170
Sasha: 2,218,490,620
Cathy: 4,210,034,930
Angela: 1,595,508,400
WINNER: Cathy (2)

GAME FIVE: ARCADE MODE
Sasha: 3,552,765,950
Cathy: 6,009,072,250 (#12 All-Time)
Angela: 2,437,830,920
Oscar: 5,400,252,030
WINNER: Cathy (3)

GAME SIX: FLIPS CHALLENGE
Cathy: 1,970,496,940 (#8 All-Time, game stole last 8 flips)
Angela: 1,885,123,480
Oscar: 1,600,925,100
Sasha: 1,180,951,000
WINNER: Cathy (4)

GAME SEVEN: SWITCH ARCADE
Angela: 1,988,882,800
Oscar: 2,609,084,890
Sasha: 7,163,464,260 (World Record)
Cathy: 4,588,797,400
WINNER – NEW SWITCH WORLD CHAMPION: Sasha (1)

GAME EIGHT: SWITCH CLASSIC MODE
Oscar: 2,903,327,210
Sasha: 2,232,952,510
Cathy: 1,296,957,600
Angela: 2,996,921,760 (#30 All-Time)
WINNER: Angela (3)

GAME NINE: SWITCH PRO MODE
Sasha: 713,466,110
Cathy: 606,795,950
Angela: 1,019,079,600
Oscar: 3,007,901,030 (World Record)
WINNER – NEW SWITCH WORLD CHAMPION: Oscar (1)

GAME TEN: PRO MODE
Cathy: 1,364,682,400
Angela: 1,790,686,930
Oscar: 1,230,330,210
Sasha: 782,564,250
WINNER: Angela (4)

GAME ELEVEN: ARCADE MODE
Angela: 4,245,250,630
Oscar: 4,149,940,900
Sasha: 1,402,822,350
Cathy: 4,500,962,340
WINNER: Cathy (5)

GAME TWELVE: ONE BALL CHALLENGE – BEST BALL OF THREE
Oscar: 623,092,420, 407,435,420, 3,508,341,570 (#7 All-Time)
Sasha: 48,519,030, 237,049,790, 609,014,890
Cathy: 377,549,280, 293,339,700, 38,386,550
Angela: 303,125,040, 359,189,210, 950,877,070
WINNER: Oscar (2)

GAME THIRTEEN: FIVE MINUTE CHALLENGE
Sasha: 727,707,100
Cathy: 527,355,070
Angela: 764,002,200
Oscar: 522,742,150
WINNER: Angela (5)

GAME FOURTEEN DISTANCE CHALLENGE
Cathy: 2,045,656,630 (#3 All-Time, Xbox Record)
Angela: 753,172,320
Oscar: 792,318,610
Sasha: 1,048,502,620
WINNER – NEW XBOX WORLD CHAMPION: Cathy (6)

FINALLY TALLY
Cathy: 6 wins *WINNER*
Angela: 5 wins
Oscar: 2 wins
Sasha: 1 win

Monster Bash (Pinball FX Table Review)

Monster Bash
First Released July, 1998
Zen Build Released October 29, 2019
Main Platform: Pinball FX
Switch Platform: Pinball FX 3
Designed by George Gomez
Conversion by Peter “Deep” Grafl
Set: Universal Monsters Pack ($6.99)

Like so many Pinball FX builds, what’s here is fine, but there’s always room for improvement.

Monster Bash was created to be a table simple enough anyone could get into it but deep enough that anyone could get REALLY into it. So, it’s arguable that this table’s journey from conception to reality is one of the most successful the medium has ever seen, because it accomplished every goal George Gomez set out to complete. If you want to learn more, I interviewed George here. Monster Bash is so instantly charming that you forget that it’s actually one of the tougher shooters Williams had in the DMD era. I imagine this must have been popular with what few operators were still installing pins in their arcades in 1998. We’ve had games that ended shockingly quickly, given our skill levels.

Normally we dislike the “enhanced graphics” of Pinball FX’s Williams/Bally pins. In the case of Monster Bash, whoever came up with the concept nailed it. They kept the plastic toy look of the elements and just, you know, animated them. I like that.

Most problematic is right orbit, where a rolling ball sometimes lightly grazes the inactive Dracula toy, giving it enough bounce to give you a house ball right down the middle of the drain. This happened so much that a house ball is all but guaranteed over the course of a normal three ball game, which is why Dad and Angela dropped their scores to GREAT and refused to budge until Zen fixes this. It became quite the argument, especially since this can happen in real Monster Bash tables. In fact, people have been known to cut the toes off the Dracula toy to prevent it. Angela took the “Spirit of the Table” argument: this should not happen in any video version, because this phenomena was never George Gomez’s intention, and that the infamous “toe clip” is a byproduct of the mechanism not working as intended, so Zen’s conversion should have no collision with the toes. My argument is the “reality of a real table” argument: whether intended or not, it happens in real life and game designers don’t intend all kinds of things that ultimately factor into gameplay. While I’m all for fixing old games, in the case of Monster Bash, Dracula’s toes are one of those bugs that have risen to the level of becoming legitimately part of the table’s lore.

We did our best to try to find a correlation with how much bumper activity there was versus house balls off the Drac toes. The result was the opposite of what we expected. In fact, the more lively the bumpers were on the ball, the less likely it was that a house ball would result. Instead, the more slowly and smoothly a ball rolled in the orbit, regardless of what the ball had been doing before that (IE bumpers or a rejection), the more likely it is to clip the Drac toy and dive down the center of the table. For example, a full Wolfman orbit, left to right “around the world” circuit NEVER ONCE was aimed at the drain, but a slow moving drop off the lanes above the bumpers became very high risk.

Since I guess I’m starting with the negatives, what is up with those ramps? My father compared that left ramp to Wile E. Coyote’s giant slingshot contraption, where the coyote catches himself in the sling and he always has enough time to look into the camera with that wide-eyed “uh-oh” look before being launched backwards to his doom. Again, it’s hard to complain because this happens on real Monster Bash tables, but in the wacky world of video game adaptations of real tables, sometimes those rejections sure feel like they were hit cleanly enough and with enough force to clear the ramp and it still rejects. Since Zen’s physics have so much side-spin (I lost count of how many times we’ve said “didn’t you think video pinball physics would be better by 2024?” playing this table), sometimes it feels like a made-shot gets cancelled by physics engine quirks. The right ramp, on the other hand, is much easier to clear even when you shank a shot and it seems like it should be a rejection. You’d swear the two ramps each had their own unique physics engine.

Dracula shoots great. One thing about Pinball FX over Pinball FX 3 is we all think toy targets shoot better.

And, that’s pretty much everything we can complain about, except we all note that this table is bad for blood pressure because there’s just so many house balls, rejections, or bad breaks that scores feel capped by the ball doing something weird. Oh, and timing never feels consistent. When we were dueling for high scores, sometimes it feels like the “overtime” for a mode ends instantly, and other times we’d scream bloody murder when someone scored a final hit well after time felt like time should have expired. So, why the hell do the rest of us have this as a MASTERPIECE? It sure seems like we have a lot to complain about, right? Well, I think Monster Bash is a MASTERPIECE because how many tables can say that nearly every single shot, and every single angle, is a joy to shoot?

Do you know what’s weird about the giant CD called “Monsters of Rock” in the center of the playfield? There really was a famous CD called Monsters of Rock, that was released in June of 1998. Anyone who watched TV in the United States around this time, no matter WHAT you watched, surely remembers the onslaught of ads for it. They were EVERYWHERE, but I mostly remember the CD because my mother listened to it while dancing and singing around the house all day long with the biggest, most joyous smile on her face while holding the TV remote like it was a microphone. Over twenty-five years later and she can still recite the tracks in order. The pinball machine called Monster Bash came out in July of 1998, one month AFTER the CD. This seems to be a monster-sized coincidence, and it took my mother a single glance at the CD on the playfield to confirm that wasn’t the font on her CD. This is a cosmic fluke right up there with Dennis Menace being created by two people at roughly the same time on separate continents. The famous barrage of TV ads for the CD wouldn’t have been airing by time the “Monsters of Rock” CD design on the pinball table was finalized and being manufactured. Did this cause any problems? I dunno, but I wish I had thought to ask George Gomez about it. And yes, Mom had ALL the CDs, including Monster Ballads and Monster Mayhem.

Since the modes stack and any active mode stays active during multiball, Monster Bash is relatively grind-free. Best of all is the scoring is so finely-tuned that it feels scientific, at least before you factor in how overvalued just activating Monsters of Rock is. The truly great and deeply missed Lyman Sheats Jr. did the scoresheet, and along with the rules for Attack From Mars and Medieval Madness, Monster Bash’s scoresheet is Sheats’ masterwork. The two tiers of Wizard Modes and how those modes work is particularly genius. Fully completing any one mode lights that monster’s instrument. Light EVERY instrument and you get “Monsters of Rock” with massive payouts. So massive that I question the wisdom of having such a large point bonus just for starting the mode. On the plus side, the journey to getting to Monsters of Rock is so open to variation that it lends itself PERFECTLY towards creating your own strategy. I’m a fan of just trying to get as many normal Monster Bash wizards and extra balls as possible. Angela preferred to get as many monsters as possible to the VERGE of their mode starting, then lightning either Frankenstein OR Monster Bash itself and using the multiball to light instruments. She was the only one of us who could consistently get Monsters of Rock, so hey, maybe she’s onto something.

The only shot in Monster Bash that we didn’t universally agree was “satisfying” was the Creech locker. Angela and Elias are not fans of it. And since I couldn’t find another space for it, I’d like to say that the Monster Bombs are a clever idea. Each creature has its own unique “bomb” that can be activated to score a jackpot during its mode and tick off one of the required hits. Again, it lends itself to risk/reward gameplay and multiple possible strategies.

The other big reason to put Monster Bash in the elite category is because it’s a table that builds your confidence like no other pinball machine does. It mostly does this via being surprisingly generous with its extra balls. One is gotten just by lightning half the modes, which takes maybe a minute. This even works on your second cycle of modes, after you’ve already done a Monster Bash. Wha? Really? That’s awesome! Also, the replay extra ball is set to a fairly low 60,000,000 points, cherry bombing twelve shots up the middle channel lights an extra ball (thirty will too, but I’ve never done THAT good) and lighting four out of six instruments lights the special. Hell, if your first ball dies quickly, or especially your first two, it’s likely the mystery hole will award an extra ball. Sometimes the mystery hole just gives you an extra ball even if you’re putting up a massive score. Angela was given so many bullsh*t extra balls that there was nearly a riot in my home. There’s no point in doing a Vice Versus section for Monster Bash. We dueled 31 games. She won 29 of them. The best thing I can say about Monster Bash is, even getting dominated during the dueling, I don’t remember my family having as much fun as we’ve had playing Monster Bash the last couple weeks. If the ramps were just a teeny tiny bit less rejection heavy, or if the right orbit didn’t just randomly feed the drain, or especially if Monsters of Rock didn’t have such an absurdly high auto-payout before you even start shooting for scores, I’d call Monster Bash the best pin ever. Few tables personify “fun for all ages” quite like it.
Cathy: MASTERPIECE (5/5)
Angela: GREAT (4/5)
Oscar: GREAT
Jordi: MASTERPIECE
Dash: MASTERPIECE
Dave: MASTERPIECE (Pinball FX 3)
Elias: MASTERPIECE (Pinball FX3)
Sasha: MASTERPIECE
Scoring Average: 4.75 – MASTERPIECE
🏛️THE PINBALL CHICK PANTHEON OF DIGITAL PINBALL INDUCTEE🏛️
N00b Factor: The frequent houseballs might frustrate newcomers, but Monster Bash was also created specifically to appeal to players of all skill sets with simple angles and rules. It largely succeeds in this and is one of THE great casual tables that can also remain fun as players gain skill.
Verdict: At only $6.99, the Universal Monster Pack is a must-buy Pinball FX pack for newcomers interested in learning pinball. Creature of the Black Lagoon makes for a decent if unspectacular throw-in bonus with it.

The Addams Family (Pinball FX Table Review) UPDATED with Nintendo Switch Details

The Addams Family
First Released March, 1992
Zen Build Released February 16, 2023
Main Platform: Pinball FX
Switch Platform: Pinball FX
Coin-Op Designed by Pat Lawlor
Conversion by Zoltan ’Pazo’ Pataki
Stand Alone Release ($9.99)

Make sure to read the entire review for a special note on the Nintendo Switch port.

I’ve almost run out of things to say about Addams Family. It’s the biggest seller of all-time and the dream table of most novice pinball collectors. What I find fascinating is all of these accolades and achievements are earned despite Addams Family being, frankly, one of the most unfair pinball machines of the 1990s. There are so many ways where the table’s mechanics can override perfect play and still kill you, and this on a table already crowded in a way that’s tailor-made to punish you for bricks. Specifically, it’s those damn magnets that push the ball down the drain or an outlane. We’ve all experienced the pleasure of starting the Seance and having the magnet immediately guide the ball straight down the drain a half-second into the mode. Seriously, Seance is the most maddening mode in the history of pinball. Pat Lawlor could have built a compressed airbag that blows up in the player’s face, and that act wouldn’t make him as big a jerk as Seance does.

Addams has two historically amazing ramps. So satisfying to hit, especially the side one. The little twist it does at the end is so delightful.

And of course, when the Thing Flip bricks so badly you die from it? That’s one of those moments where taking a sledgehammer to a $10,000 pinball machine becomes oddly tempting. So, why is this table beloved? Perhaps it’s because Addams Family integrates its theme better than any pinball table of the arcade era, producing exactly the type of pinball-based gameplay that celebrates a macabre family who doesn’t follow society’s rules. It’s not fair, but it doesn’t pretend to be, either. It revels its unfairness with a wink and a hug that’s endearing, even if the table is plunging a knife in your back as you embrace it. I can’t say enough about Raul Julia’s historically amazing call-outs. Sometimes real life movie stars phone-in their pinball voice work. Not Julia. He belts his call-outs with gusto. Cheers to the great Raul Julia, performer of the greatest pinball voice over in history! 🍻

How fun it must be to get the “remove Christopher Lloyd from the art” assignment.

Zen’s take on Addams is an imperfect port. Yes, Thing Flips misses on a real table, but, it’s a woefully bad shot in Pinball FX. Oddly, the first few builds of Addams on PRO difficulty had the ball moving so fast that Thing Flips didn’t even work in that setting. Now, it not only works, but the PRO difficulty is the best-shooting Thing Flips in all of Zen’s builds. All other variations? If this were the NBA, Zen’s Addams is the table you want to foul in a close game with only seconds on the clock, because that auto-shot is a bricklayer. The magnets for the start of the Seance or when you’ve lit multiball are also much more lethal on Pinball FX than they are in real life, with about a quarter of our games being an instant kill when the magnets carry the ball from the VUK to the drain in literally less than a second. Many purists would have it no other way, but part of me wishes Zen would create a second, idealized version of Addams that isn’t engineered like a cabinet that has to earn a living two quarters at a time.

No judgment if you want to play with the enhanced graphics on. But, you should know that you have to wait for the graphics to tee-up the pinball, which actually makes a difference in the five minute mode.

One last note on the Thing Flips shot: in a real life table, when you or the auto-shot misses the cross-table Swamp shot, it’s fairly common for the ball to ricochet in a way where you get a second chance to convert the shot. That almost never happens in the Zen Studios build. In my opinion, Pinball FX in general doesn’t have enough PING off solid surfaces. You can tell that their engine is built for their original works more than for the Williams/Bally pins because ricochets and rebounding matter a lot less in their newly-created tables, most of which aren’t defensive-minded. Coin-op pinball during the 80s and 90s, by its very “earning quarters, one player at a time” nature, requires pinball to be played defensively, with a heavy emphasis on rebounding and conversion shots. It speaks volumes to how strong Addams Family is as a table that I’m still going MASTERPIECE, even though I prefer the Arcooda build.

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The gap is closer than ever before, and if Zen Studios can improve their physics, especially their problems with balls going limp when they should be ricocheting, they move head-and-shoulders above Arcooda. For now, Arcooda’s Addams is #1, by a slim margin. Of course, that’s a minimum $150 buy AND you must already own the tables on Pinball Arcade. Otherwise, it’s a $500 buy-in (and it requires two monitors) for a marginal upgrade. Or, maybe it’s not so small of a margin. One thing that bugs the hell out of me about Zen Studios is their refusal to include the options real tables have. I’ll get into that more in Vice Versus underneath the body of this review, but I’ll take this moment to note that Williams/Bally tables were loaded with fun options, and Pinball FX offers exactly none of it outside the “pro” difficulty, where the slope of the table is increased, the outlanes are widened, and the table’s internal toggles are set to “extra hard.” That isn’t very fun because of the steeper slope. I wouldn’t even mention this stuff except I know these guys making these tables and I know they’re better than no options at all.

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On Nintendo Switch Addams has a fairly significant problem, albeit one that I am HOPING to delete (along with this entire section) later this Summer. If you take a dead flip from the Electric Chair, the ball will bounce across from the left flipper to the right flipper, then roll-up the right inlane’s switch, activating the temporary light of the electric chair, which you can then reshoot. This almost never happens on the coin-op. If your aim is true, you can use this to quickly run through the different modes and reach TOUR THE MANSION in record time. Now granted, you won’t be scoring as many points as you’d think if you begin this cycle right off the bat, since if you cheese the game, you’re not scoring points on Cousin It, Raise the Dead, Thing Multiball, and the Mamushka. But you can start cheesing the table at any time, making the final push towards TOUR THE MANSION trivial. For this reason, everyone but Elias discussed this and we decided to drop our ratings by one rank on Switch until this is fixed.

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NINTENDO SWITCH UPDATE: The Big Update everyone’s been waiting for has dropped on Nintendo Switch, and with that, an improved Addams experience. Thing Flips are much more accurate, and manually shooting is much easier. Since Angela’s strategy is to charge-up the value of the Swamp Shot and tee it up till her heart’s content, she appreciates the much more true-to-life angles. The magnets are also much more accurate than they were before. Unfortunately, it’s still too easy to use the electric chair exploit mentioned above. For that reason, Angela, Oscar, and Dave have decided to keep their Switch scores in place. I’m not. I think that if a person wants to burn through the doors without utilizing their value, that’s on them. It’s a risk/reward calculation that makes sense. True to life? Not in the case of the electric chair’s drop. Everything else? This is a much improved experience. Make sure to read our Addams Family on Switch feature, which also includes a look at the ultra-rare (delisted in under two hours) Pinball Arcade version of Addams on Switch!
Cathy: MASTERPIECE
Angela: MASTERPIECE – GREAT on Nintendo Switch
Oscar: GREAT – GOOD on Nintendo Switch
Jordi: MASTERPIECE
Dash: GOOD
Dave: MASTERPIECE – GREAT on Nintendo Switch
Elias: GREAT – Played on Nintendo Switch
Sasha: MASTERPIECE – GREAT on Nintendo Switch
Standard Pinball FX Scoring Average: 4.5 – GREAT
Nintendo Switch Scoring Average: 4.0 – GREAT
📜Awarded a Certificate of Excellence📜

VICE VERSUS

The electric chair is one of pinball’s all-time great drivers.

Addams Family makes for a great competitive table, which is why we’re so disheartened that hot seat’s modes don’t allow for scores to the online leaderboard, when there’s no real competitive advantage for using hot seat mode. It’s also frustrating that there’s no options beyond the seven main gameplay modes. We like to play “Galactic Rules” which is 10 Balls + 10 Potential Extra Balls, or “Iron Ball” which is 10 Balls, no Extra Balls, and we’ll tinker with the rules like extending the hurry-up time, or the ball save time, etc. We’re certainly not arguing those should count towards online leaderboards, but we’d have a LOT more fun with Pinball FX if not for the lack of options. This ability was up-sold on Pinball Arcade as the “Pro Mode” which, if Zen were to do that, yea, we’d pay for the upgrade. Zen wastes too much time on fancy “enhanced” graphics when the best upgrades are right there, built into the pinball’s software itself. Still, Addams is one table we never get sick of competing against each-other in my house.

GAME ONE – CLASSIC
Sasha: 157,922,100
Cathy: 217,160,880 – Toured
Angela: 169,511,430
Oscar: 208,727,270
WINNER: Cathy (1)

GAME TWO – PRO
Cathy: 60,519,390
Angela: 114,712,130 (24th All-Time)
Oscar: 50,239,100
Sasha: 56,579,540
WINNER: Angela (1)

GAME THREE – ARCADE
Angela: 236,139,300 – Toured
Oscar: 242,113,290 – Toured
Sasha: 190,444,270
Cathy: 162,871,540
WINNER: Oscar (1)

GAME FOUR – 200 FLIP CHALLENGE
Oscar: 273,896,180 – Toured (#13 All-Time)
Sasha: 219,255,320 – Toured
Cathy: 365,014,030 – Toured (#6 All-Time)
Angela: 175,645,620 – Toured
WINNER: Cathy (2)

GAME FIVE – ONE BALL CHALLENGE
Sasha: 50,543,940
Cathy: 87,197,950 (#22 All-Time)
Angela: 87,779,430 (#21 All-Time)
Oscar: 41,610,620
WINNER: Angela (2)

GAME SIX – FIVE MINUTE TIME CHALLENGE
Cathy: 115,861,870
Angela: 102,849,350
Oscar: 146,568,420 – Toured (#15 All-Time)
Sasha: 112,528,890
WINNER: Oscar (2)

GAME SEVEN – DISTANCE CHALLENGE
Angela: 174,440,950 – Toured
Oscar: 220,258,300 – Toured (#10 All-Time)
Sasha: 138,220,420
Cathy: 291,323,480 – Toured (#3 All-Time)
SERIES WINNER: Cathy 3 – 2 – 2 – 0

South Park: Butters’ Very Own Pinball Game (Pinball FX Table Review)

South Park: Butters Very Own Pinball Game
Platform: Pinball FX
Set: South Park Pinball ($9.99)
Included in Pinball Pass
Designed by Szucs “ndever” David
Originally Released October 14, 2014

This is a reminder that Butters made multiple earnest attempts at destroying the world, by drowning everyone and by destroying the o-zone layer. Oh sure, it was adorable how ill-conceived and childlike his attempts were, but they were good faith efforts at human extermination. He’s not THAT wholesome.

It’s probably best that pinball fans look at the Butters table as a throw-in bonus for South Park: Super-Sweet Pinball, where $10 nets you one really well done PG-rated South Park pin and one middle-of-the-road, mundane and average pin. Which isn’t to say that you should ignore Butters’ Very Own Pinball Game. I really did think it was completely decent. It’s just impossible to build-up any momentum thanks to Zen’s typically violent slingshots and over-indulgent modes. In this case, I think the slings are easily the worst part. Seriously, holy crap, those slingshots should be in a holding cell, staring at a clock as it inches closer to midnight with a priest reading them their last rites while a pair of three-drug cocktails, a gurney, and IVs await in the next room over. They’re silverball serial killers that, all by themselves, drop Butters from maybe as high as a GREAT table to barely GOOD. Well, actually the horrendous mini-field with physics so weirdly inconsistent that it’s practically broken doesn’t help, either.

While they don’t look the part, the flippers for the Professor Chaos mini-table feel nubby. The physics for the mode are completely different than a normal table. The Vices all agree that the slope feels non-standard, but we disagree as to whether it’s too shallow or too steep. It kind of feels like it alternates between both, depending on where the ball is. Regardless of whether it’s too steep or shallow, flips on the mini-field have this weird shuffle-pass sensation. It’s as if you’re playing pinball with an air hockey puck that has fluctuating weight. As if that’s not bad enough, the four targets are boring AND that you have to shoot them twice each. Combine that with the fact that there’s no ball save, and thus rounds of this catastrophe could end in literally a second or two, and it quickly became my least favorite of the table’s modes. This might be the worst mini-field Zen has ever done. It really put a damper on the whole Butters experience, because I really don’t think their physics have ever been worse.

You absolutely MUST play the ball out of the saucer or risk a quick drain. While it’s not a 100% certainty, the drop from the saucer hangs right over the drain. If you’re not attempting to shoot the cellar or spin disc, what you can do safely is hold the bat flipper out, which should give you a gentle drop down to the primary flippers to gain control of the ball.

The rest of Butters is all about basic, nearly bare-bones light-shooting. Modes are started by putting the ball in the saucer in the center of the playfield, then converting the follow-up shot with the bat flipper into the spin disk. The disk is surrounded by several targets, and by total chance, you have to score 50 hits on the targets. It sounds like a lot, but you shouldn’t need more than two successful shots in the spin disc. Between the three members of my family, ONE TIME in an entire week of playing this table did one of us need three shots, whereas completing all 50 in a single shot wasn’t rare at all. In extremely rare cases, the ball gets launched out of the spin disk, though it should be playable even if this happens. After lighting the mode start, you’re given five options. The worst is Chaos vs Coon & Friends, which is entirely the mini-table I whined about above. By far the easiest mode is Marjorine, and the scoring is completely screwed-up on this one. You only need to complete three shots and return the ball to the mode start VUK. Each of the first three shots gives you two options. Besides the third shot, all four of the shots score in the millions of points. It’s a cinch.

I’ve heard of shooting bricks, but this is ridiculous.

Last of the Meheecans is indicative of everything Zen Studios does wrong pinball modes. The previous mode I talked about was four shots, all simple angles, and only one of which is an optional high-risk shot. This one is seven shots, all of them with much higher difficulty, all of them much more risky, and all but one of them score much less points. In this mode, you have to shoot five orbits, but the entrances to those orbits have rising-and-lowering walls. Once you clear four of the five orbits, the final one must be shot three times, and it’s only now you’re putting up million point scores. And you’re on a timer, on a table with long return times. Because hitting each shot once just plain wasn’t enough, I guess. How come Marjorine is four shots for more points and this is seven shots for less? It makes no sense.

Butters relies heavily on the bumpers for the AWESOM-O mini-mode and for the high-yielding dress-up Butters score. As long as I wasn’t on AWESOM-O the ball would bounce around like crazy in the bumpers. But, as sure as the sun will rise, whenever I *was* on the AWESOM-O mode, the ball would bounce out after a single goddamned bump. Two bumps at most. It was so uncanny that I’m convinced it’s rigged.

The other modes are under-paying and just totally average. Turn butters into a vampire by shooting three orbits and then the saucer three times. Put on a Hawaiian shirt and shoot fifteen orbits with a multiball. There’s also a couple side-quest multiball modes as well that are the same basic modes with fewer targets and an add-a-ball mapped to the generous vari-target. I normally hate vari-targets (they’re my least favorite pinball targets) but this one is clockable and relatively safe off a brick. Sadly, most of the mini-modes are quite dull. The only one we all universally enjoyed was the Ninjas side-mode. There’s four ninja targets and you have 60 seconds to shoot them for 150,000 points a hit. They respawn five seconds after being struck down, but if you can complete all four within five seconds, you score ten million points. Again, I can’t stress enough: none of us HATED Butters. We just hated that no amount of skill can overcome the slingshots, and the complete lack of balance. But, let it be said that the Williams-like layout and simple angles makes for a nice bonus to go along with the unforgettable Super-Sweet. Now then in the spirit of Butters, GO TO YOUR ROOM, ZEN! YOU’RE GROUNDED FOR THOSE SLINGSHOTS!
Cathy: GOOD (3/5)
Angela: GOOD (3/5)
Oscar: GREAT (4/5)
Jordi: GOOD (3/5)
Dash: BAD (2/5)
Dave: GOOD (3/5)

South Park: Super-Sweet Pinball (Pinball FX Table Review)

South Park: Super-Sweet Pinball
Platform: Pinball FX
Set: South Park Pinball ($9.99)
Included with Pinball Pass
Designed by Peter “Deep” Grafl
Originally Released October 16 2014
Awarded a Certificate of Excellence by The Pinball Chick Team

Keep in mind that our team’s fandom of South Park as a show is all over the place. Dad (Oscar) and Dash are 100% complete lifetime non-fans. Myself and Jordi are lapsed fans, while Dave is somewhere between the two groups. Only Angela is a modern “never misses an episode” fan of the show and even has viewing parties with friends. Some of us factored in the theme, others focused on the table. One odd note is that Zen is just weeks away from releasing Pinball M, their M-rated Pinball FX spin-off (oh.. hey, I get the name now), but this South Park is rated E 10+ by the ESRB. There’s not even bleeped cussing in here. Weird.

South Park’s tables being returned to Pinball FX after a six year absence is proof positive that all bets are off with Zen Studios. As if getting the World Cup and Indiana Jones licenses didn’t already prove that, now they’re bringing back their long-lost Pinball FX2 pins as well. South Park: Super-Sweet Pinball is probably their most famous pre-PinballFX3 pin (it’s either it or Plants v Zombies). It’s back, and it plays well with the new Pinball FX engine. Super-Sweet pinball is a smooth-flowing finesse table only somewhat held back by a brutal difficulty combined with modes that demand too much perfection in what is an imperfect art form.

The Vices (that would be myself, Angela, and Oscar for those keeping track at home) have put 30+ hours into Super Sweet Pinball. For all the whining you’re about to endure, we all *really* enjoyed it. However, some of the angles are too impossibly risky. Chef’s door is a whole other level of “WHY DID YOU STICK THAT THERE?” mind-f*ckery. Unlike Dash and Angela, I never considered moving off my **GREAT** rating. The risk/reward balance is too screwed-up for that.

Super-Sweet isn’t entirely an original table by Zen. Hold a mirror to the layout and it’s a close approximation to Stern’s Simpsons Pinball Party. I don’t know if that was meant to be a “Simpsons Already Did It” joke or not, but given that Ant-Man is a mirrored version of Theatre of Magic, probably not. The similarities are mostly superficial in nature, though South Park does take after Simpsons with multiple highly stackable modes. Unlike Simpsons, you can’t go into the settings to adjust the hurry-up times. The biggest problem with South Park is how damn unforgiving it is. It’s not enough to activate the modes. The modes have to be finished to achieve the S-O-U-T-H-P-A-R-K lights that are the ultimate object. That’s nine modes, with three additional modes (one of which is a grindy multiball). Finishing four of them lights an extra ball, but even on our third day, it wasn’t all that rare for each of us to finish games with only one light (typically it was the Kenny light, which is a lay-up). And, we really don’t suck at pinball. Hell, I’m the reigning Arcade mode world champion on this table at the time I’m writing this, and I finished that game barely halfway there. They’re a LOT of work just to get started, THEN you have to.. you know.. beat them!

The Stan and Kyle scoops are deceptively hard shots. For Kyle, if you have a gentle roll on the right flipper, a backhand is a relatively safe option. Stan? Not so much. If there’s a low risk angle for it, we haven’t found it. Annoyingly, despite being a very high-risk shot, Stan’s hurry-up is too short and very undervalued relative to its difficulty. Really, the only value it has is it gives you the S light. Lighting four of the S-O-U-T-H-P-A-R-K lights will light the extra ball target. My suggested order is Kenny, Sarcastaball (which has an additional extra ball attached to it), School Bus Multiball, and Manbearpig. You can sub Stan’s Hurry-Up (annoying as it is, once it starts, it’s one shot to complete) for any of those. The Vices NEVER successfully completed Kyle’s mode (Mr. Hankey Multiball) or Chef’s mode. Not once.

Let me pick an almost random example: the School Bus Multiball. To get it, you must shoot the school bus ramp NINE times. You must then lock four more balls shooting the same ramp. THEN, you must complete the shots for all four of the boys AND sink the balls back in the bus ramp you had to grind nine shots out of to begin with. I’m fairly sure that you need to only lock one of the balls to get the “R” letter, but either way, this is massive grindy time investment. I can’t stress enough: the most successful pinball tables of all time kept their “doors” lit whether or not you were successful in the mode or not. That’s the kind of pinball that generated the biggest success the medium has ever had BY FAR, so why wouldn’t you do that, Zen? You have 110+ tables on Pinball FX, and you expect HOW BIG a time commitment towards “git’n gud” at them? Kyle’s requires you to get the K-Y-L-E lights, then 3 locks on the sarcastaball-ramp, THEN you have to get a super jackpot in multiball. AND IT’S ONLY WORTH A MILLION POINTS for that super jackpot.

The super skill shot is quite risky. I had a lot of shots go straight down the drain off it. You should have the ball save lit, but still, it’s a bitch. When this target isn’t standing, it’s replaced by a TV target that requires you to hit it.. I’m not making this up.. 247 times just to light an extra ball. Come on, Zen. Now you’re just straight-up trolling. It’s worth noting the “episodes” you get from hitting this add to your end-of-all bonus as well. If I shoot a target 247 times, I expect the table to gain sentience and eat me. Though actually, at one point, I had an EB light that I couldn’t figure out where it came from. It’s entirely possible it was from this.

Compare the relatively low scores of the other modes to the T-I-M-M-Y mode, which is NOT for one of the letters but yields the highest scores. By far! Timmy’s easy-to-get lights are along the flipper lanes. After lighting them, you have thirty seconds to go nuts on a single shot next to the Kenny loop. Use the left flipper and a cherry-bomb shot, and you’re gold, OR, you can use the bat flipper. Yep, the best target in the game can be shot from both the left primary and the bat flipper, and boy, does it score points. You only need to hit it once and you’ve got a cool million points, and it adds another million every time you repeat it. Do the TIMMY shot twice, and you’re made three million points. Three times? Six million. Four times? Ten million. And so forth. And so forth. You can grind that one shot, 30 seconds at a time, and still score hundreds of millions of points. You can use this as an excuse to light the C-A-R-T-M-A-N lights, since that shot feeds you a softball for the bat flipper to shoot the TIMMY shot. Oh, and if you miss it off the bat flipper? You’re either hitting the Kenny Loop, Randy Ramp, or if you’re way off, you’re hitting the J-I-M-M-Y lights for the kickbacks! It’s so badly balanced. My arcade world record right now is probably 40% to 50% made of that one shot. That’s not balanced. I should note my father disagreed with me all weekend about how low-risk it was, since the Timmy target is a cherry bomb shot straight over the drain. I almost never lost a ball from it. He’s just plain wrong.

Assuming the mini-table doesn’t glitch out on you and ruin your game (and it might), you’ll want to get good at it since the extra ball light is that cow up at the top of it. The biggest pinball mistake Angela will ever make is letting me see how she cracked the super skill shot. Here’s how: let the ball “settle down” on the right (lower) flipper before flicking. It should bounce off the target and roll around the goal post. Grind this up to a 10 million point level and then complete the super skill shot on the main playfield to light an extra ball. Takes practice but I can now do it almost every time. It’s HIGHLY clockable. The balloon part? Not so much. Another tip: don’t shoot the tethered balloon directly. Use the same strategy as I stated above and DO NOT shoot the balloon directly. ANY contact with the balloon will light the S-A-R-C-A-S-T-A-B-A-L-L lights, even if it’s on the return. Now, when the balloon is cut loose from the tether, sorry friend, but you’re on your own. I sucked at it.

Will someone in charge at Zen Studios tell their table designers to tone it the f*ck back, already? Because the tables aren’t better for demanding this much commitment out of them. The tables aren’t ever more fun because of the repetitive grinding. They’re less fun. Nobody is going to devote six months towards one table to get good enough to get the wizard mode. Look at how few people are posting wizard-level scores on Zen Originals versus Williams pins (that don’t require endless grinding with no forgiveness for failure) and ask yourselves which tables people are having more fun with? I know I’ve been whining about this a lot lately, but it’s an issue. People aren’t finishing these tables. GOOD PLAYERS aren’t. That’s not a virtue.

This screenshot alone is PACKED with incredible shots. Dad coined the Kenny loop a “shoelace loop” or “The Ritchie Shoelace” which is a close cousin of “The Ritchie” as seen in tables like Black Knight, High Speed, etc. Oh, and Kenny is probably the easiest letter on the entire table. Or, you can shoot the Randy loop, which is a bit tougher and activates the super-grindy Bat-Dad mode. Or, one shot on the Randy Loop also lowers the blimp to activate Sarcastaball and grant access to the mini-table (where an extra ball can be nabbed). OR, you can get the T-I-M-M-Y lights and then shoot the Timmy vertical target, which is potentially the most valuable shot on the table. Finally, the J-I-M-M-Y lights that activate the valuable kickbacks are just under the Randy shot, though it’s nearly a blind-angle off the bat flipper.

Now, with that whining out of the way, I should probably note that we all loved the layout for South Park. Of all the “super difficult” Zen originals, South Park is probably neck-and-neck with Clone Wars for having the best transitional flow. While South Park is absolutely packed with modes and mini-modes, the transitions from shot-to-shot are smooth regardless of what modes you’re aiming at. And, unlike Whirlwind, we could use post transfers to great effect this time. You’ll need passing for this one, as the key modes are timed. Cartman’s Anal Probe requires thirty spins of the spinner in sixty seconds (approximately four flush shots), and at that point, you’re only halfway there. You then have hit three UFOs in thirty seconds. Manbearpig is ten shots, then a straight-shot up the middle, THEN collect six piles of gold, THEN one final cherry bomb up the center. Bat-Dad is the hardest by far. You have to shoot a high risk cardboard target to “throw a jab” which ticks off a little bit of his health. To “throw a haymaker” and do extra damage, after hitting the cardboard target, you have to very quickly connect on a follow-up flashing light shot. I have no idea how many times you have to do this. We never came close to finishing it. We never finished the Chef’s mode. They were too high risk, and it made more sense to shoot the TIMMY lights for maximum yield.

The Terrance & Phillip themed bumpers are *incredibly* violent and, when their mode is charged-up, high-yielding. Angela at one point banked nearly ten million points off them in a single shot based solely on pure blind luck of getting the ball jammed between them. There’s also a Lawlor Path between them that acts as Stan’s Hurry-Up shot, as well as additional Canadian Multiball and Manbearpig shots. However, it’s a very high risk shot, and the bumpers, fun and profitable as they can be, may also murder your ball via the right outlane or even a drain plunge. I held my breath every time.. which feels oddly fitting for fart-themed bumpers.

The big question is “can non-fans enjoy South Park?” I actually think it might be true of both non-show fans and non-pinball fans. Don’t mistake my usage of “super difficult” for being “impossibly difficult.” It’s not that bad. Actually, South Park: Super-Sweet Pinball is an incredibly fun table. Strangely generous too. Take the Cheesy Poof bag, for example. It’s the score multiplier and it’s right next to two necessary shots: the left Manbearpig/Canada/Cartman orbit and the school bus ramp. If you brick either of those shots, you get rewarded with the Cheesy Poof bag, which is fairly low-risk to hit. In fact, the entire left side of the table is so tame and workable that it’s practically gentle. You’d never imagine that South Park is a steel ball serial killer. Oh, it is, and it can be maddening in how many different shots can kill you. But, while I still firmly protest how much work Zen expects people to do to earn wizard modes, all credit where it’s due: it never gets boring, at least with this table.

Cathy’s, who took the crown from Angela, who took it from Cathy.

Cathy: GREAT (4/5)
Angela: GREAT (4/5)
Oscar: MASTERPIECE (5/5)
Jordi: GREAT (4/5)
Dash: GREAT (4/5)
Dave: MASTERPIECE (5/5)
CERTIFIED EXCELLENT BY THE PINBALL CHICK TEAM

Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (Pinball FX Table Review)

A New Hope
aka Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Set: Star Wars Pinball Collection 1 ($23.99)
Designed by Peter “Deep” Grafl
Originally Released April 29, 2014
Included in Arcade1Up’s Star Wars Table
Awarded a Clean Scorecard by The Pinball Chick Team

You have to wonder if they knew a decade ago they would some day make a My Little Pony table if they would have saved a horseshoe shaped table for that.

Our family nickname for A New Hope keeps getting more and more elaborate. It started as the “Big Horseshoe” then it became the “Great Horseshoe” and now it’s at “The Great and Powerful Horseshoe.” This is probably how religions get started up. By 2025 it’ll be “The Almighty Galactic Horseshoe of Divine Holiness” and we’ll still be unanimously stuck on rating it GOOD. It’s the definitive middle of the road Zen original that both delights us and breaks our hearts with its squandered potential. Still, there’s no doubt that A New Hope holds up in 2023, nearly a decade after its release. But, a decade later, all the warts that were inherent to it all along are more and more glaring. Despite the playfield being made almost entirely of orbital shots, you have incredible freedom in A New Hope. Each of the orbits is tied to a bonus mode, and the T-U-S-K-E-N orbit is also the mode start. Getting into a groove building combos is incredibly rewarding, especially since they were spot-on valuing combo shooting.

A New Hope jerks off with its animation too much. I’ve had multiple instances where I nail the Hidden Skillshot dead-on, only instead of, you know, GETTING POINTS, the ball explodes because the table is STILL loading the playfield because there’s so many useless animations. Sometimes modes take FOREVER to get going or to end because it takes forever for a stormtrooper or Obi-Wan to waddle their fat asses off the table. WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS, ZEN? Everything should be already in place, but Zen crammed so many masturbatory animations into this pin that sometimes the speeder is still positioning itself and the ball bounces off it, or sometimes a stormtrooper literally scratches their head looking around. I often have to hold a trap for 15 or more seconds waiting for everything to reset after a mode ends. That’s beyond ridiculous.

A New Hope’s biggest annoyance is a magnetic playfield in the dead-center of the playfield that randomly throws your ball, potentially down the already deadly outlanes. That magnet is such a weird decision. I guess it’s supposed to be the force field of the Death Star, but my question is: why does it fling? Just have the ball bounce off it like a wall. Also, several of the main modes (especially scene 6) and the hurry-up bonus mode require you to shoot ball onto a temporary mini-field in the center of the screen to fight enemies, but sometimes the physics and the ball don’t cooperate and the ball just plain explodes for a soft reset. The modes are NOT generous with their time, and since it takes too long for the ball to reset, it only really serves to create frustration. There’s also just too much reliance on luck in the bonus modes. It’s not really possible to guess (or react quickly enough) to the Tusken Raider, and the video mode (along with its ultra-valuable extra ball) is totally random.

**Oscar on Mode Balance**: Ideally, side modes in pinball, once you factor in the work to activate them and the risks of shooting them, have full parity. A New Hope’s side mode balance is completely out of whack. Both the Cantina shooting gallery and A New Hope’s Video Mode have the ability to light the valuable extra ball lamp within them. Lighting the video mode, where scoring and rewards are 100% luck-based, requires you to to light the letters A-L-L-I-A-N-C-E on the non-dominant left side of the table. A relatively higher risk shot for an unknown reward. Comparatively, the easier to play shooting gallery requires one fewer letter (C-A-N-T-I-N-A) across what is arguably the table’s primary orbit. Both orbits feed the R-E-B-E-L lights that drive the modes, but you’re incentivized to shoot A New Hope left-to-right due to the left outlane being much easier to defend against. It’s a tiny lack of risk/reward parity that throws the balance of A New Hope into the garbage disposal.

There’s lots of other annoyances. A New Hope has some of the most pathetic kick-backs ever. They sort of lightly volley the ball up and onto the playfield, but the gentle arc created often throws the ball right between the flippers. I’ve had multiple instances where a kickback sends the ball straight down the drain. Like, straight down it, and man alive, does it piss me off every time. I don’t know what Zen’s fetish is with this kind of weird “could only happen in video pinball” invisible force field kickbacks that don’t really help players and instead, just as often, are worse than trying to manually defend against the outlanes. I have to go back to what I’ve asked of them a million times: do you want to make good pinball tables or do you want to be a complete f*cking assholes and troll your customers? Because you can’t do both at the same time. A New Hope is a potentially great table that they took a sledge hammer to, and I don’t get it. Why would you do these things the way you did them when it doesn’t add challenge so much as it just trolls the players? I want to note that my sister is calling me a “cry baby” right now, as she likes the way this handles the kickbacks. She’s adopted, and I’m the reigning arcade mode World Champion of Star Wars: A New Hope as of this writing, so my word counts and her’s don’t. Thems the rules!

Then again, the Death Star modes are all pretty dang good. I can’t imagine it’s possible to better mimic the most iconic battle scene in sci-fi better than A New Hope does. It saves the table!

What frustrates me most of all is that A New Hope could be one of THE elite Star Wars tables with some modifications. Shortening-up the modes would be a good start. We’ve been playing these tables for four years now, and A New Hope is one of the tables we’ve played the most of any Zen table. It’s arguably THE signature table of Zen’s Star Wars pins. Yet I’ve personally never started the Wizard Mode, and Dad and Angela each only have reached the wizard once apiece. Ever. Going off the leaderboards, it would seem 99.99% of players never get that far. There’s just too much work getting there. The hurry-ups don’t offer enough time, especially on a table that wants to look good more than it wants to play good (this is known as Russell Westbrook Syndrome, or at least it should be) and thus it could take FOREVER to get the ball back to the flippers. I will never understand how Zen can see themselves get more attention for classic Williams announcements, but then go so overboard on creating their modes. You don’t need a mode to be a multi-tiered, almost no room-for-mistakes marathon. The most popular pins of all-time didn’t do that. What are you trying to compensate for, Zen?

I’ve had these blaster shots roll up the lane and down the outlane. Made shots should never have potential to die. Ever.

Most of our records are set by Angela these days, but I am the reigning Star Wars A New Hope Arcade Mode World Champion at the time of publication. Also, my father is A New Hope’s One Ball Challenge World Champion and Angela is the Distance Challenge World Champion and a former Flips Challenge record holder. VICE FAMILY DOMINATION!

For all my whining, there’s a reason why we keep coming back to A New Hope, and not just because it’s the first table alphabetically. Long as the modes are, they never feel like a grind, like some Zens get saddled with. It’s a good case study on how fun a Zen table can be even when they screw up so many things. The layout is iconic. It should feel gimmicky, right? It’s f’n giant horseshoe right in the middle of the table. That’s ALL it is. But it works. The multiballs are all exciting AND challenging. The rails are brutal, BUT, you’re giving enough nudge warnings to defend against them. Angela, our best player, credits A New Hope with learning how to defend the outlanes with Zen’s physics. We all agree the biggest problem isn’t the magnet or the long modes: it’s the lack of focus. A New Hope doesn’t do any one thing spectacularly. It tries to be all-encompassing of the video pinball experience. That’s the thing about being a jack of all trades: they’re masters of nothing. Apparently, that includes The Force too.
Cathy: GOOD (3/5)
Angela: GOOD (3/5)
Oscar: GOOD (3/5)
Jordi: GOOD (3/5)
**CLEAN SCORECARD**

A Samurai’s Vengeance (Pinball FX Table Review)

A Samurai’s Vengeance
Platform: Pinball FX
Set: Honor and Legacy Pack ($9.99 MSRP)
Designed by Zoltan “Hezol” Hegyi
Awarded a Clean Scorecard by The Pinball Chick Team

For a newcomer’s first designed table, this really feels like it would earn a student an “A”. Really, it’s only compared to other original works in Pinball FX that a Samurai’s Vengeance falls a bit on the bland, conservative side. But, it falls HARD on that side, so much that it nearly missed out on a clean scorecard.

I hope new designer Zoltan Hegyi and Zen Studios don’t take this the wrong way, but A Samurai’s Vengeance felt sort of like a Zaccaria table. Which isn’t to knock Magic Pixel’s pinball stalwart either. They’ve put out many fantastic tables. What I mean is that Samurai’s Vengeance takes a generic theme, hits every single cliché to go with that theme, stretches the mileage one would expect you could get out of it to near breaking point while somehow not managing to include one single memorable shot, and yet the end result still ultimately ends up being a decent table. Sorry for the run-on sentence. Samurai is so by-the-books that it doesn’t feel like your typical non-licensed Pinball FX release. Maybe that’s a good thing, and for the record, I’m a-okay with busting out all the conventional themes and tropes. It’s pinball. If you can’t be unserious in a serious way, you’re doing it wrong.

The lack of memorable modes or shots does sting quite a bit here. Like so many Zen tables, a lot of Samurai’s problems come down to modes feeling like a grind. In the course of our dueling, which usually involves dozens of games, we never once activated the Random Fortune. It requires you to shoot the Torii gate a whopping eight times. Why would we even do that when all the important shots for the modes are on the other side of the table? We can spend our time grinding up a random award that may or may not be worth the effort, or we can shoot the swinging door katana sword or the spinner to grind up our strength, and then try to start a mode. We know the modes have value. The other side is a massive grind. The multiball requires four balls to be locked, and that’s if the ball lock is even lit. The risk/reward wasn’t balanced properly, because none of us wanted to shoot that side of the table at all. It was too risky when we know that completing the modes yields a final tally of ten million points plus all the scoring that leads up to it. If you’re going to grind, grind the modes, right?

A Samurai’s Vengeance is one of those tables that makes me wish, once again, that Zen would move away from these slow, multi-tiered modes and instead try to replicate the style of pinball’s most profitable and successful era of the 90s. There’s a reason why their most popular tables are recreations of arcade tables from that era: that’s what people like about pinball. A Samurai’s Vengeance has massive pacing issues beyond just requiring so much grinding. When you start a mode, there’s about a fifteen second delay between the mode start and the ball reaching the flippers to start playing again. Mind you, there’s no animation for this. It just takes that long to load. We’re NOT going to get invested in the characters of a pinball table. We’re invested in shooting targets. Now, having got all that out of the way, A Samurai’s Vengeance has good flow, no really offensive flaws, and even a couple gags that gave me a chuckle. I said “oh, you bastards” when they happened, but I also laughed. Will you remember it when you finish it? Not at all. Is it decent enough while you play it? Yep.
Cathy: GOOD (3/5)
Angela: GOOD (3/5)
Oscar: GOOD (3/5)
Jordi: GOOD (3/5)
Dash: GOOD (3/5)
**CLEAN SCORECARD**

THE ADDAMS FAMILY PINBALL FX FOR NINTENDO SWITCH

THE PINBALL ARCADE ON NINTENDO SWITCH THE ADDAMS FAMILY COMPARISON

THE VOTES

Xena: Warrior Princess First Released May 16, 2024 Main Platform: Pinball FX Switch Platform: Pinball FX Designed by Anna Lengyel Set: Universal TV Classics ($14.99)

Crypt of the NecroDancer Pinball FX Debuting Pin First Released April 13, 2023 Main Platform: Pinball FX Switch Platform: Pinball FX Designed by Gergely ’Gary’ Vadocz Stand Alone Release ($5.49 MSRP) Links: Pinball FX Wiki

World Cup SoccerFirst Released February, 1994Zen Build Released October 20, 2022Main Platform: Pinball FXSwitch Platform: Pinball FXDesigned by John PopadiukConversion by Zoltan ’Pazo’ PatakiStand Alone Release ($9.99)Link to Strategy Guide

VICE VERSUS

Monster Bash First Released July, 1998 Zen Build Released October 29, 2019 Main Platform: Pinball FX Switch Platform: Pinball FX 3 Designed by George Gomez Conversion by Peter “Deep” Grafl Set: Universal Monsters Pack ($6.99)

The Addams Family First Released March, 1992 Zen Build Released February 16, 2023 Main Platform: Pinball FX Switch Platform: Pinball FX Coin-Op Designed by Pat Lawlor Conversion by Zoltan ’Pazo’ Pataki Stand Alone Release ($9.99)

VICE VERSUS

THE ADDAMS FAMILY
PINBALL FX FOR NINTENDO SWITCH

THE PINBALL ARCADE ON NINTENDO SWITCH
THE ADDAMS FAMILY COMPARISON

Xena: Warrior Princess
First Released May 16, 2024
Main Platform: Pinball FX
Switch Platform: Pinball FX
Designed by Anna Lengyel
Set: Universal TV Classics ($14.99)

Crypt of the NecroDancer
Pinball FX Debuting Pin
First Released April 13, 2023
Main Platform: Pinball FX
Switch Platform: Pinball FX
Designed by Gergely ’Gary’ Vadocz
Stand Alone Release ($5.49 MSRP)
Links: Pinball FX Wiki

World Cup Soccer
First Released February, 1994
Zen Build Released October 20, 2022
Main Platform: Pinball FX
Switch Platform: Pinball FX
Designed by John Popadiuk
Conversion by Zoltan ’Pazo’ Pataki
Stand Alone Release ($9.99)
Link to Strategy Guide

Monster Bash
First Released July, 1998
Zen Build Released October 29, 2019
Main Platform: Pinball FX
Switch Platform: Pinball FX 3
Designed by George Gomez
Conversion by Peter “Deep” Grafl
Set: Universal Monsters Pack ($6.99)

The Addams Family
First Released March, 1992
Zen Build Released February 16, 2023
Main Platform: Pinball FX
Switch Platform: Pinball FX
Coin-Op Designed by Pat Lawlor
Conversion by Zoltan ’Pazo’ Pataki
Stand Alone Release ($9.99)